


On Thin Ice

by mosylu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Criminal AU, F/M, Jewel thief!Caitlin, also flirting as flirting, fighting as flirting, superhero!Cisco
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-06 23:10:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12828123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: Cisco knew the infamous jewel thief wouldn't be able to resist the fabulous diamonds in the Central City Art Museum. But he wasn't expecting how darn cute the ice-powered criminal was going to be.





	On Thin Ice

**Author's Note:**

> For the Tumblr prompt "Damn, you're cute"

Cisco stepped into the gallery and said out loud, “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the Winter set.”

The woman with the spill of snowy white hair, standing over the case, went still. Then she lifted her head and smiled at him. “What can I say? I just have a fondness for … ice.”

All Cisco could think for a moment was _Damn, you’re cute._

_No, stop. She’s not cute, she’s an international jewel thief._

_Who’s awful cute._

“Hey, I don’t blame you,” he said. “I like some bling myself. But that’s bling that’s on loan to the Central City Art Museum, so I’m going to have to ask you to put it down.”

She lifted her hands, watching half a million dollars’ worth of diamonds drip through her fingers. “What if I don’t want to?”

He shrugged. “Too bad. We all have to follow the rules, and one of the biggies is, no stealing other kids’ toys.”

“Oh, please. Like Harrison Wells would miss this? He’s probably going to get a huge insurance payout.”

“Yeah, that still doesn’t make it right for you to be stealing it.”

She shook her head. “Look, you’re not paid nearly enough to deal with me, so why don’t you go back to your guard station, get a donut or something, and call the police? They’ll come play CSI, I’ll be long gone, and you’ll be out of harm’s way. I call that a win for everyone, don’t you?”

“Well, that’s insulting. Just because I’m a brown guy, you assume I’m an underpaid security guard?”

She arched her brow. “No, the uniform, badge, and hat that all say SECURITY in bright red letters make me think you’re a security guard.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “Forgot I was wearing that.” He threw a boom that knocked the necklace out of her hand, sending it flying across the room.

She stumbled backward in surprise and studied him, eyes narrowing. “You’re no guard, are you? You’re the Vibe. Central City’s favorite Boy Scout.”

Ugh. “Okay, there’s no _the,_ all right? I’m just Vibe. And you are?”

When she didn’t answer, he added, “The papers all call you ‘mysterious ice mutant,’ so if you want something better - ”

Her eyes slid toward the necklace, lying on the floor fifteen feet away, and then back to him. “Call me Killer Frost.”

“Well, that’s just a warm and fuzzy moniker, isn’t it? You ever thought of rebranding?”

“Why? It tells people everything they need to know about me, and most of them are smart enough to get out of my way.” She swept her arm out and a rain of knife-edged ice shards spit themselves at him.

He said, “Whoa!” and threw up a sound-shield in the nick of time. Not quite the nick - sharp stings on his forehead and the backs of his hands betrayed where a couple of shards had made it through.

That had been surprising. He swiped at his forehead, and frowned at the blood. “Well, ouch,” he said. “We were just getting to know each other.”

“You normally assault women as a way of saying hello?”

“If you recall, the way I said hello was, 'Please stop committing that misdemeanor.’”

She rolled her eyes. “This is no misdemeanor.” She stroked the earrings and tiara still in the case, eyes glinting with avarice. “This is definitely a felony.”

“I don’t know whether it’s better or worse that you know that and you’re doing it anyway.” Either way, it was sort of hot. “Hey, are we gonna fight or flirt? I mean, either one is fine by me, but a boy does like to know where he stands.”

Quick and slick, she hurled an ice dagger at his head. He ducked just in time, and felt his hat fly off. When he chanced a look upward, it was pinned to the wall, the ice dagger buried at least three inches deep.

“Fight it is, then,” he said, and threw another boom at her.

She opened her mouth and blew out a cloud of mist to meet it. Of course, it didn’t do anything. Not much could stop one of his booms, and the crash of a body on the floor told him it had knocked her silly, the way it was meant to.

He took a step toward the sound and stopped, cursing internally. He had no idea where she’d landed, or even where anything was in the dense, chilly mist that surrounded him.

The mist hadn’t stopped his boom, but it hadn’t been meant to. She’d used it to buy herself the time to recover from the hit, time he undoubtedly would have used to go apprehend her.

Cute and smart too? Awwwww, he’d better keep remembering she was a bad guy or he’d be done for.

Something scraped the floor, and he turned toward it. The mist was beginning to thin, and he saw a hand closing around the necklace. “Hey! Put that down!”

A blast of ice shards suddenly cut the mist to ribbons, and without enough time to throw up a shield, he had to duck sideways. Blast, blast, blast, three in a row until he was almost running across the room.

On the fourth blast, he realized his mistake as his feet came down on something wet and slick. Like the world’s worst Stooge, he went flying across the room on the ice slide she’d created and crashed into the wall like a ton of bricks.

When his head stopped spinning and his vision cleared, he rolled over to find the mist dissolved, but every entrance sealed with ice at least three inches thick, and Killer Frost gone.

Good thing he didn’t have to use doors.

He breached out of the room and looked up and down the corridor. No catsuited lady villainess, booking it away from him. No chill in the air, no stray snowflake, no ice rimes to mark her passing.

He ran around the perimeter of the main gallery. Nothing. Not so much as a frost crystal on the wall. Killer Frost had just … melted away.

He breached back to the guard station and flipped through the security cams. “C'mon, c'mon,” he muttered. “Oh, you’re kidding.”

The cameras showed only a quiet, peaceful museum. Even when he flipped to the main gallery, it all looked like it should. No iced-over entrances, no ice slide, the Winter set still intact. If he didn’t know better he’d say that all was well.

But he did know better.

She’d gotten into the system somehow and done the ol’ looping-the-camera trick. Amazing how that still worked.

He ran his hands through his hair. “Well, shit.”

The curator was gonna be so pissed. He’d had to talk fast to get installed as the new night guard anyway, and Killer Frost had taken her sweet time coming around for her bling.

About all he’d accomplished from this was educating himself on the 17th century Baroque style, discovering three new excellent late-night takeout joints in the area, and crushing hard on the art conservator with the big brown eyes. All worthy endeavors, but not exactly what he’d promised the curator.

“Shit,” he said again, and picked up the phone to call the cops.

He paused and frowned at a Pepto-Bismol pink bakery box, sitting off to the side of the guard station computers.

“Now that’s interesting,” he murmured. “How did she know we had donuts?”

* * *

In a small, cramped office in the bowels of the museum, a woman held up her compact, watching the regular chestnut color spill down to the ends of her whitened hair and her eyes seep back to their usual brown. Reassured that her coloring was back to normal - sometimes it took a little while to settle when she was rattled - she peeled out of her dark-blue catsuit and stuffed it into a gym bag.

She paused for a moment to admire the glittering necklace and mourn the earrings and tiara she’d had to leave behind, courtesy of do-gooder interference.

Wells wasn’t going to be happy.

He’d offered her a lot of money for this job, and she’d demanded even more for the risk she was running, working her night job in the same place as her day job.

She shrugged. She’d gotten the most spectacular piece, and even a portion of her fee contained a big beautiful number of zeroes. If he wanted the rest of the set to hide away in his super-secret vault and collect the insurance on, he was going to have to offer her a lot more, considering that he hadn’t mentioned Vibe was likely to step in.

She wrapped the necklace in a soft velvet bag, then again in a cotton scarf, and finally stuffed it in a crisp, shiny cardboard box, carefully sealing the flaps with a glue stick from her desk before stashing it in her capacious purse. She would walk out of this place tomorrow, blush and twitter when the security guards checked her bag, and watch them recoil from the Tampax box like it held a bomb.

Her prize secured, she dressed herself in her civilian clothes again and sat at her desk, scowling.

She should have known there was something off about the new security guard. Who was that _friendly?_ He hadn’t even stared at her chest or made off-color remarks. He’d just seemed nice and chatty and shyly into her. She’d been honestly debating with herself about whether to accept whenever he worked up to asking her out on a date.

There’d been absolutely no sign that he was a superhero.

She sighed and muttered, “Damn, he was cute.”

FINIS


End file.
